Focus areas of our autumn program 2010 are architecture, design, and photography.

Christian Lutz continues his photographic study of power structures with “Tropical Gift”. He took portraits in Nigeria of people who live by and with the economic force that dominates everything there, the oil and gas industry. The photographs observe the protagonists’ everyday lives and professional world from very close up, the rich profiteers in the capital and the indigenous population in the oil region, the Niger delta. The pictures tell their own story of business with these coveted raw materials subtly, but highly expressively.

The famous Italian designer Massimo Vignelli allows us a glimpse of his understanding of good design in this book, its rules and criteria. He uses numerous examples to convey applications in practice — from product design via signaletics and graphic design to Corporate Design. By doing this he is making an important manual available to young designers that in its clarity both in terms of subject matter and visually is entirely committed to Vignelli’s modern design.

Günther Vogt and his landscape designers bring a lot of passion to their research and to their search for ideas for transforming undesigned sites or tracts of land into landscapes. They don’t want to depend just on knowledge acquired from books. They venture out into the landscape at all times of the day and year and interrogate what they see there. They make room for art and science in their studies and use the same tools to turn their landscape designs into reality. Most of their “field trips” begin out of curiosity based on something they’ve seen, heard, or read. Against this backdrop, they explore, among other things, fortifications in France, the Upper Rhine in Switzerland, and national parks in England. The results of their “field trips,” research projects, and practical implementations are collected in this publication. “Distance and Engagement” takes up where “Miniature and Panorama” left off and shows not only what Günther Vogt is working on but also, and above all, how he works.

The Zürich architects Fuhrimann Hächler take on the most diverse building commissions. The present volume is devoted in particular to private residences, most of them realized for clients who are at home in the architectural and art scenes. These homes captivate by virtue of the clarity and simplicity of their constructive materials, their economically effective construction, and their haptic, sensual surfaces and flowing spatial transitions. Outstanding examples of their architecture include the Haus Presenhuber in Vnà (2007), the Haus Müller Gritsch in Lenzburg (2007) and their own residence in Zurich (2003).

The text contributions take the reader beyond the featured residences while situating these within the overall oeuvres of the architects.

With contributions by Hubertus Adam, Kurt W. Forster, Gianni Jetzer and the architects

Like a living skin, the architectural surface provides an impression and expression of human needs, moods and time-related commitments of our designed environment. The surface is what we perceive with all our senses at the same time as spontaneous, synaesthetic, multi-dimensional experience. Working on the basis of his work in his department at the ETH in Zurich, in this publication Gregor Eichinger therefore shifts emotional relationships between people and architecture into the centre. Touch Me’s associative switches between interdisciplinary texts and pictorial sequences create a cosmos of our perceptions of the built and designed environment.

This publication reports on tree nurseries all over the world, their contexts, the historical backgrounds to their emergence, the ways in which they influence town and landscape planning and the relevant economic factors. Here the relationship between man and his environment is always in the foreground of the investigation; this has been shown from time immemorial in terms of plant production in all regions. The desire to produce and the ability to transform things, to be creative, have characterized human existence and man’s environment from the outset. Each chapter contains essays and travel reports with photographs of the present situation.

Architectural Papers series is edited by the Josep Lluís Mateo Chair at the ETH Zurich since 2005. Covering the wide range of topics related to teaching and architectural culture in general, it is aimed at expanding the narrow boundaries of the discipline. Its fifth issue concentrates around the new conditions for architectural practice and around the new epistemologies that may inform it in the next future. That is, in the period after the financial bubble has collapsed and living and working conditions have significantly changed. Essays, studies and interviews, along with a selection of indicative projects, tackle the actual issues of growth and shrinking, economy and ideology, craftsmanship and social space in the city, materiality and sustainability in architecture. In a logical sequence, they depict the current reality of architecture. 

With contributions by Iñaki Ábalos, Solano Benitez, Alexander Brodsky, Isabel Concheiro, Frederick Cooper Llosa, Hans Ibelings, Krunoslav Ivanisin, Julio Martinez Calzon, Josep Lluís Mateo, Richard Sennett, Wang Shu and Ramias Steinemann

Designing the posters for the annual Kieler Woche sailing regatta has developed into one of the most prestigious European design competitions since it started in 1948. Since 1959 only five designers or design practices have been invited to take part in the competition, so that participation as such represents a distinction and has proved a crucial milestone in many designers’ careers. Winners and participants such as Ruedi Baur, Wim Crouwel, Willy Fleckhaus, Jan Lenica, Josef Müller-Brockmann and Odermatt+Tissi are outstanding European designers. The brief has remained unchanged for 60 years, and offers a unique survey of the development of European graphics.